You can make dozens of delicious meals out of minced meat. It’s the basis of many dishes, so it’s important to know how to cook it well.
Here are seven culinary tricks for cooking minced meat to perfection.
Making minced meat
You can make minced meat in three different ways:
- Use a meat grinder
- Use a blender
- Manually by using two sharp knives
When you chop the meat up with knives, the result will be juicier: because it’s been chopped rather than completely broken down as happens in a meat grinder, all the juices are still present in the meat. A blender does something similar, but in this case it completely pulverises the meat, turning it into a paste. You can chop the meat using one knife, but with two it will be much faster! The knives should be very sharp and relatively heavy (a good choice here: professional knives used by chefs). In order to deal with the meat properly you also need a heavy and solid chopping board, under which you need to put a kitchen towel for stability.
’Meat duets’
Professional chefs often recommend using several different kinds of meat so that they complement each other in terms of juiciness and taste. The classic combination is beef + pork, but in fact, this isn’t the best one out there. There are many more interesting ’meat duets’ you can try, including:
- beef + lamb
- beef + chicken
- lamb + chicken
- pork + turkey
- pork + rabbit
The only exception to this is if you want to make home-made burgers — it’s better to use only one type of meat here. Chef Mark Statsenko explains:
For burgers we only use beef. In addition to beef, there’s a mixture of vegetables and sauce inside the cutlet which complements the meat’s taste perfectly.
What else to add?
In order to make minced meat really delicious, you can add the following additional ingredients:
- white bread, soaked in milk
- butter
- grated cheese
- lard
Raw vegetables and fruit give extra juiciness to the meat — potatoes, squash, zucchini and grated green apple (one medium-sized apple is enough for 600 grams of meat). Also, the mince can be made “heavier” by adding such things as rice.
Spices and seasonings
Here are some winning combinations for spices and seasonings:
- For beef, use nutmeg + pepper
- For lamb, use cumin + coriander
- For pork, use nutmeg, pepper + a couple of drops of worcester sauce
- For chicken, use turmeric (if you’re a fan of curry)
The perfect amount of seasoning can be determined only by experimenting. It’s better to start with small doses.
Keeping it together
Here’s one more important point: minced meat needs to be squeezed together until you have a smooth and springy ball. This is essentially to prevent it from breaking up into little parts during cooking.
Let it cool down
Once you’ve made your minced meat but haven’t yet cooked it, it should be left to cool for a while. In the words of one professional chef,
Best thing you can do is put the meat in the refrigerator for at least half an hour. This will make it juicier and the additional mixture of vegetables and sauce will come together well. Besides, it’s easier to form cutlets out of cold minced meat, and when you fry them they increase much more in size if they were allowed to chill.
Frying minced meat
If you decide to fry some meat cutlets, cover them in flour, oatmeal, breadcrumbs or sesame seeds — that way they will be much tastier. Once they’ve been fried, finish cooking them in the oven to make them even better.
